The Lone Eagle's Final Flight

In a sense it was a stunt, a daredevil adventure that no man who was concerned about his safety and his future should have attempted. But Charles Lindbergh's 1927 pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic in a single-engine plane that cruised at less than 100 m.p.h. was surely the most glorious stunt of the century--one of those pristinely pure but magnificently eloquent gestures that awaken people everywhere to life's boundless potential. For most of his life Lindbergh was looked upon as an argonaut of the air age, a Ulysses from Minnesota. When he died of cancer of the lymphatic system last week at age 72, America lost not only one of its pioneers of the machine age but perhaps its last authentic hero.

Lindbergh's father, a populist Republican Congressman from Minnesota, had taught him to be totally self-reliant--"One boy's a boy; two boys are half a boy; three boys are no boy at all," Lindbergh fondly quoted him as saying--and the son always had a vigorous contempt for the herd mentality. Itching to fly ever since he first saw an airplane as a child, Lindbergh spent a year and a half at the University of Wisconsin. Then, unable to sit any longer in a classroom, he enrolled in a flying school in Nebraska.

"I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground," he later wrote. "In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime."

The young pilot barnstormed the country after he finished flying school, offering plane rides at $5 a head to farmers and small-town people. Later he flew airmail between St. Louis and Chicago, which in the primitive conditions of the '20s was about as hazardous as riding the Pony Express through a tribe of angry Comanches. A natural flyer, with as certain a feel for the whim of his plane as a bareback rider for his horse, he was ineluctably drawn to aviation's biggest prize: $25,000, offered by a New York hotel owner for the first successful completion of the 3,600-mile solo flight between New York and Paris. With the backing of some young St. Louis businessmen and $2,000 from his own savings, Lindbergh ordered a plane built by Ryan Airlines in San Diego to his peculiar specifications; it was in effect one giant gasoline tank with wings, a propeller and a bucket seat. He named it The Spirit of St. Louis, and in May 1927 flew it to New York.

Mysterious Chemistry. Other flyers were waiting for the good weather of spring to try the distance. Learning that Atlantic squalls would soon lift, Lindbergh decided to be first and lifted off from Long Island's Roosevelt Field even before the weather turned. The Spirit was so weighted with fuel that he cleared the telephone lines at the end of the runway by only 20 feet. His route took him up through New England, over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, past the green southern tips of Ireland and England, and finally over the Channel to France.

Even before he landed, some mysterious chemistry, an interaction between his own personality and public need and desire, had caught the imagination of millions. For the 33 1/3 hours of the flight, many people on both sides of the Atlantic talked of little else but the chances of a man who had already been dubbed "the Lone Eagle." Shortly after 10 p.m. on May 21, he circled Le Bourget Airport, but was puzzled by what looked like enormous traffic jams on the nearby roads. He quickly found out the cause; even before the Spirit's propeller stilled, both Lindbergh and his plane were engulfed by shouting, crying, joyfully hysterical Parisians.

Simple Dignity. The shouting and the hysteria did not stop for years there after, but Lindbergh managed to retain his simple dignity. "He stood forth amidst clamor and crowds," said U.S.

Ambassador to France Myron Herrick of the 25-year-old pilot, "the very embodiment of fearless, kindly, cultivated American youth--unspoiled, unspoilable." Lindbergh was offered a $1 million movie contract, another $1 million to go into vaudeville, and presents that ranged from a live monkey to a home in Flushing Meadows, N. Y. Most of the presents were declined or turned over to the Missouri Historical Society, and one of the few contracts he accepted was one to write his own story, We--the other person being his airplane.

The Lindbergh name was magic all over the world, and the extent of his fame is impossible to understand now, when celebrities are made daily on TV. If he sent shirts to the laundry, they were not sent back. If he wrote a check, it was never cashed. If he checked a hat, it was somehow lost. All became souvenirs, precious talismans of the other wise cynical Jazz Age.

Two years after his flight, Lindbergh, now an aviation consultant, married Anne Morrow, the bright, pretty daughter of Dwight Morrow, a rich New York City banker who was then serving as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. Anne was a writer, later destined for fame on her own, and together they settled down to a quiet, productive life in New Jersey. Peace was short-lived, however. In 1932, the Lindberghs' first and then only child, 20-month-old Charles Jr., was kidnaped from a second-floor nursery. Ten weeks later, the body was found in a shallow grave in some woods near the Lindbergh home. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a Bronx carpenter, was later convicted in probably the most celebrated trial of the century, and then electrocuted for the murder. Throughout the search for Charles Jr. and throughout the Hauptmann trial, the Lindberghs were hounded by the press, which treated their ordeal with savage sensationalism. Finally, Lindbergh packed up his family (there were eventually five other children) and moved to Britain and then France, where he stayed until the eve of World War II.

Impressed by the progress of Nazi Germany's air machine, and equally appalled by the lack of preparedness in Britain and France, Lindbergh in 1941 joined America First, an isolationist group, in urging the U.S. to stay out of the war. Britain and France were doomed, he said, and Germany and the Soviet Union would eventually destroy each other. Though he immediately volunteered for service after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt would not forgive his earlier opposition to America's policy of helping the Allies, and he refused him a uniform. As a civilian consultant to the War Department, however, Lindbergh was able to perform valuable service in improving planes and fighting techniques, both on the assembly lines at home and on the battlefields of the South Pacific.

Nonetheless, Lindbergh never recanted his isolationist position. While he was never an anti-Semite or a fascist, as some charged at the time, he remained appallingly insensitive to the true evils of the Hitler regime. "His self-confidence thickened into arrogance," said English Writer Harold Nicolson, an old friend. "His mind had been sharpened by fame and tragedy until it had become as hard, as metallic and as narrow as a chisel."

After the war Lindbergh, while still remaining a high-level consultant to Pan American World Airways, became an early, ardent and passionate conservationist, traveling around the world in the cause of the environment. In his last years his favorite spot was a simple, five-acre retreat on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

And Maui was where he chose to die and be buried. When doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York told him last month that he had only days to live, Lindbergh, confined to a stretcher, had himself flown to Maui, where he arranged the details of his funeral and burial as meticulously as he had planned his flight to Paris 47 years before. Following his instructions, he was buried within eight hours after his death. Hawaiian cowboys crafted a roughhewn casket of eucalyptus wood, and a grave was quickly dug atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific. His body was dressed in a khaki work shirt and dark cotton work trousers and, according to his wishes, his pallbearers also wore simple work clothes. The other mourners, including his wife and his son Land, wore Hawaiian-style attire.

Storied Victory. In contrast to the spartan funeral, tributes poured in from over the world, more befitting a great leader than a man who considered himself a simple aviator. President Ford said that Lindbergh "represented all that was best in our country--honesty, courage and the will to greatness." It is doubtful whether younger generations could fully appreciate his achievement. For those who were listening to their radios in 1927, however, or who have the wit and imagination to re-create the epoch in their own minds, Lindbergh's daring, lonely journey will remain forever matchless, a storied victory of one man over nature, his own fears and the imponderable odds against him.

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